Community and COUNTER

Last week Siân was at the Researcher 2 Reader conference in London and took part in some workshops on community engagement. Different organisations engage with their communities in different ways, and we thought it would be interesting to share COUNTER’s approaches to engaging with our community.

COUNTER’s community is COUNTER

Firstly, and most importantly, our community is COUNTER. COUNTER would not exist without the libraries, consortia, publishers, publishing services companies, aggregators and others around the world who join COUNTER and who engage with each other and with our small team. The community worked together to develop the original Code of Practice and every enhancement and evolution of it. Every development to the Code and every best practice guideline is developed by and with the community. We hold consultations, webinars and discussions about every change. Everyone can respond and we will always feed back what we have done.

Over recent years we have worked to expand the geographical reach of the COUNTER community. Our friendly guides are available in six languages, thanks to the translation efforts of people in the community. We welcome offers of further translations. We have also made COUNTER membership free for organisations in Research4Life countries. In the past year, we’ve added another 11 countries to those represented in our database; most of these are in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

COUNTER committees play a deeper role

Some COUNTER members also volunteer to be part of our committees, an opportunity that is open to every member organisation. Working groups of our Advisory Committee work together to develop the draft best practice guidelines before they go out to consultation. The Education Committee decides the theme of the conference and serves as a conference committee, as well as advising on other educational activities. The Code Team leads on technical developments. And the Board and Executive Committee oversee the governance and running of COUNTER.

Listening and responding

As with many organisations, we try to hear from as many of the community as possible through regular surveys. This is not just a one-way process. We share the findings of the surveys and use these findings to work with our committees to develop plans. For example, the COUNTER Academy emerged as a result of the community requesting deeper training. We are currently developing other educational resources in response to frequent questions and requests.

Fostering engagement with each other

One of the key requests in our most recent survey was for a COUNTER listserv and so we launched this at the beginning of February. Just a month in we already have nearly 500 members, who are now actively using it to ask questions, share ideas and discuss with each other.

And you can always talk to us!

If you just want to know what is going on at COUNTER and learn how to use it, we have our website, newsletters and social media. However, you can also contact the COUNTER team by email, or chat with us at a conference. Tasha, in particular, goes to many conferences around the world and is always happy to discuss COUNTER.

Do you have other suggestions that you would like to see? Do let us know!